Up to 125 Qt personnel at Nokia will join Digia to continue Qt development.

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Finnish software company Digia announced today that it is acquiring the Qt software business from Nokia. Digia plans to pick up where Nokia left off: continuing Qt development, but renewing the toolkit’s focus on cross-platform support. The financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.

Qt is an open source software development toolkit that was originally created by Norwegian software company Trolltech. Nokia acquired Trolltech in 2008 and subsequently transitioned Qt to an open governance model and a more permissive licensing scheme. Nokia had originally intended to use Qt to provide a unified development framework that would work across Symbian and MeeGo.

Nokia’s decision to abandon its existing mobile platforms in favor of Windows Phone 7 raised some questions about what the failing phone giant would do with Qt. Rumors that the toolkit would soon be sold surfaced earlier this month, alongside news that Nokia was shutting down Qt offices in Australia. In our coverage, we noted that Digia, which acquired the Qt commercial licensing business from Nokia last year, was a likely candidate for buying the remaining Qt assets.

The deal is likely going to be good news for the many application developers who rely on Qt. It will put an end to uncertainty about the toolkit’s future, ensuring that development will continue in the hands of a company with a platform-neutral agenda. Qt is increasingly important in the mobile space—where it is used by HP and RIM—but it’s also important on the desktop, where it is used by Adobe, Amazon, Google, Skype, and many others.

Digia says that it’s going to bring back a strong focus on the desktop and will introduce support for Windows 8. The company will also expand official support for the toolkit to additional mobile platforms, including Android and iOS. Those are all areas that were neglected to some extent under Nokia’s stewardship.

“We are looking forward to welcoming the Qt team to Digia. By adding this world-class organization to our existing team we plan to build the next generation leading cross-platform development environment,” said Digia’s International Products SVP Tommi Laitinen in a statement. “Now is a good time for everyone to revisit their perception of Qt. Digia’s targeted R&D investments will bring back focus on Qt’s desktop and embedded platform support, while widening the support for mobile operating systems.”

As part of the deal, up to 125 of Nokia’s Qt personnel, mostly from offices in Oslo and Berlin, will be joining Digia to continue working on the project. The company says that it also wants to work with the broader community of Qt contributors to continue advancing the project under open governance and open source licensing. They are also committed to ensuring that the upcoming Qt 5 release, which is expected to land soon, will go through as planned.

Check the videos at http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-5-Alpha to get an idea what Qt is up to nowadays. In short: great graphics performance with constrained hardware requirements. From there you can work also in more powerful devices like tablets or desktop, of course.

All this with a great IDE and helpful + passionate community.

I wish the best to Qt now as a real^3 OSS project. Looking at the technologies and products around there is indeed need for something like Qt.

Sounds great. It's good to see Qt in the hands of someone who cares about it.

Also, with more support for mobile devices, perhaps this will be KDE's big break for getting on these devices? I'd love nothing more than a smartphone running KDE (that naturally syncs with my KDE laptop too!)

Digia has historically operated mainly within Finland. Getting worldwide product business is a great chance for Digia, but there probably needs to happen some learning. Previously Digia already bought the licensing business, so this is a kind of natural next step. Hopefully everything goes well.

There was no mention of the price. Nokia originally bought Trolltech for 153 million dollars. Digias revenue for 2011 was about 122 million euros. I think the price must have been at most around 10 million.

"The company will also expand official support for the toolkit to additional mobile platforms, including Android and iOS."

I doubt apple will be admitting any QT programs into their marketplace any time soon unless forced by governments. In the long run apple may lack behind in apps compared to android, and then they might reconsider but for short time strategy they are trying to keep a lockdown on developers with their proprietary programming language.

I doubt apple will be admitting any QT programs into their marketplace any time soon unless forced by governments. In the long run apple may lack behind in apps compared to android, and then they might reconsider but for short time strategy they are trying to keep a lockdown on developers with their proprietary programming language.

why not, Qt is native code, not interpreted or JIT slow, so will provide a good user experience. The drawing of the widgets in Qt is not native, but this is only a problem on Windows back in the day when everything used the win32 controls. Objective-C isn't Apple's proprietary language, its a standard one, just that no-one other than Apple uses it anymore (it was originally used for NextStep BTW).

Qt getting back to its cross-platform roots is a very good thing, Qt is an excellent product. Now, if they could only make it use the stl better and reduce the "legacy" workarounds they had to implement all those years back it'd be awesome.

"The company will also expand official support for the toolkit to additional mobile platforms, including Android and iOS."

I doubt apple will be admitting any QT programs into their marketplace any time soon unless forced by governments. In the long run apple may lack behind in apps compared to android, and then they might reconsider but for short time strategy they are trying to keep a lockdown on developers with their proprietary programming language.

They accept MonoTouch applications. I would imagine if the Ximian people can do it then Digia can too.

Presumably the count of 125 employees moving along with the purchase is a measure of its scale. Qt is relatively mature technology that should not take a huge development staff to keep current. One wonders what Windows 8 support means. It is hard to see how Qt could be run on top of the Windows runtime. Should I ever be forced to use Windows 8, I hope no special support is required to use the existing Qt Windows support on what remains of the standard desktop. In any case, hopefully, Digia will be successful in building a sustainable modest scale business supporting Qt for a user community that is also on a relatively modest scale but still quite sizeable in absolute numbers.

I doubt apple will be admitting any QT programs into their marketplace any time soon unless forced by governments.

At least in the desktop Mac App Store Qt applications are already welcome. Apple doesn't care that much in what language/with what framework your desktop app was written, as long as it follows their App Store rules.

Qt does (on the desktop) - unless you link with QtWebKit (Apple doesn't like applications bringing along their own flavour of WebKit). But I wouldn't be surprised if that would be addressed in the future as well, by wrapping the "native" Apple WebKit engine into the QtWebKit API...

This is excellent news. There are already ports for QT support over to Android, but this ought to make things better/easier. It's nice that the QT frame work is finding a nice home where it can benefit every platform.

Great news. I'm a huge open source fan so a strong Qt is most welcome. Unfortunately it won't help save KDE from the ghastly layout and design that is the KDE default.

It's not the layout. It's the inclusion of the "social desktop" crap, like nepomuk, stringi and the akonadi server. They are three of the most superfluous, unnecessary garbage/baggage pieces of code as I have ever seen. KDE, with these turned off, is actually pretty responsive, functional and pretty attractive (not the netbook layout, of course,... that's another sore spot with me).

^^ 100% this. I've been using KDE as my office desktop since 2003 and absolutely hate the horror that is Nepomuk/Strigi/Akonadi. For what they provide, the price is way too much.

Qt on Android would be my dream platform for mobile/embedded devices. It is such an elegant GUI framework. The moment Nokia started talking about 'burning platforms' I was worried about future of Qt. Hopefully, Digia will be hungry enough to push Qt to the success it deserves.

Great news. I'm a huge open source fan so a strong Qt is most welcome. Unfortunately it won't help save KDE from the ghastly layout and design that is the KDE default.

It's not the layout. It's the inclusion of the "social desktop" crap, like nepomuk, stringi and the akonadi server. They are three of the most superfluous, unnecessary garbage/baggage pieces of code as I have ever seen. KDE, with these turned off, is actually pretty responsive, functional and pretty attractive (not the netbook layout, of course,... that's another sore spot with me).

That's even worse. But just look at this (sorry to derail the thread). KDE tries to change too much too quickly.- the buttons are from the early 2000s.- the text on the task bar is cut off- margins & padding are just ugly- the mp3 player text layout is fucked

Check the videos at http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-5-Alpha to get an idea what Qt is up to nowadays. In short: great graphics performance with constrained hardware requirements. From there you can work also in more powerful devices like tablets or desktop, of course.

All this with a great IDE and helpful + passionate community.

I wish the best to Qt now as a real^3 OSS project. Looking at the technologies and products around there is indeed need for something like Qt.

@qgil - I sincerely hope you are one of the 125 transferring across to Digia (assuming this is what you want, of course, can't really understand why you would now want to remain with Nokia unless Digia have no San Francisco presence/office).

That's even worse. But just look at this (sorry to derail the thread). KDE tries to change too much too quickly.- the buttons are from the early 2000s.- the text on the task bar is cut off- margins & padding are just ugly- the mp3 player text layout is fucked

That looks great. In my defense the screenshot I picked was posted by Ryan Paul a few weeks ago announcing KDE 4.9.Anyway I'm using Gnome2 on Ubuntu 10.04 still although I'll update to 12.04 in due time.

That looks great. In my defense the screenshot I picked was posted by Ryan Paul a few weeks ago announcing KDE 4.9.Anyway I'm using Gnome2 on Ubuntu 10.04 still although I'll update to 12.04 in due time.

It is actually the official screenshot that the KDE folks used in their own release announcement.

Actually QML which is what is designed for mobile app development uses the V8 JavaScript engine, so it is very much JIT. You could ofcourse use widgets, but widgets have been designed for desktops with mouse+keyboard input, QML has been designed for touch interfaces on mobile devices.

So the most appealing Qt API for iOS, will in all likelihood never be allowed on it.

"The company will also expand official support for the toolkit to additional mobile platforms, including Android and iOS."

I doubt apple will be admitting any QT programs into their marketplace any time soon unless forced by governments. In the long run apple may lack behind in apps compared to android, and then they might reconsider but for short time strategy they are trying to keep a lockdown on developers with their proprietary programming language.

I don't see why not; QT currently is just C++, and Apple already allows lots of C++ programs in their store. QT can also wrap over the native platform UI widgets if needed.

Seriously, do a little thinking before you start with the mindless Apple bashing.

Can people please keep their opinions about KDE to them self. If you don't have anything constructive to say then just STFU. I like KDE and have used it for quite a while and I don't care that some one thinks the pixels arrangements don't meet what some text book says it should be, I (and probably most KDE users) don't give a crap that someone thinks it's ugly, so just STFU and keep it to your self.

Back on topic, which is Qt: do we have any info on what's going to happen with the licensing options? Trolltech used to charge €1500 (about $2000 at the time) per seat and target platform, so a single dev who wanted so target both Windows and OS X had to shell out €3000 in order to use it (unless you used it to create free software).

Then, Nokia bought it and it went LGPL, so you could use for free even to create non-free software. Has Digia stated anything about whether they plan to continue the LGPL licensing? Their commercial license is €4200 for multi desktop OS targets (apparently too expensive to mention on their site, but retrieved from http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/9762).

I'm planning a Windows+OS X project, but can't spend €4200, so I'd really like the LGPL option to survive the transition to Digia.